Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/21/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (David Yates, 2016)

Dan Fogler, Eddie Redmayne, and Katherine Waterston in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Newt Scamander: Eddie Redmayne
Tina Goldstein: Katherine Waterston
Jacob Kowalski: Dan Fogler
Queenie Goldstein: Alison Sudol
Credence Barebone: Ezra Miller
Mary Lou Barebone: Samantha Morton
Henry Shaw Sr.: Jon Voight
Seraphina Picquery: Carmen Ejogo
Gnarlack: Ron Perlman
Percival Graves: Colin Farrell

Director: David Yates
Screenplay: J.K. Rowling
Cinematography: Philippe Rousselot
Production design: Stuart Craig
Costume design: Colleen Atwood
Music: James Newton Howard

I think I enjoyed Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them more than I did any of the Harry Potter movies, but mainly because I wasn't distracted by thinking about what had been left out between the novel and the film. That's because Fantastic Beasts is J.K. Rowling's first original screenplay. She has a way to go yet as a screenwriter: There are too many events and incidents to keep track of, and the story gets swamped by the special effects. But we are clearly in the same realm as the Potter books, even if this movie is set in the 1920s and in New York City, where Muggles are called Non-Majes. (Which even an explanation didn't keep me from hearing "non-Madges" and thinking, "people who don't like Madonna.") And even though there's a lot of noisy CGI work going on, Rowling and her cast have given us some engaging new characters in Newt Scamander, Tina and Queenie Goldstein, and Jacob Kowalski, all of whom seem to be set for a long run of sequels. Eddie Redmayne is terrific as usual, and Colin Farrell makes a fine villain until the ending reveals him to be Johnny Depp in disguise. It was a box office hit, of course, and most of the critics seemed to like it -- the pans seemed to be colored by a weary recognition that here was what seemed to be the launch of yet another blockbuster franchise. I agree that we could do without that, but it's better than yet another Transformers movie. And there's something agreeable about even a Potter-adjacent work.